Ping - From the Apocalypse by Susan Lowry Page B

thicker.
    Approximately o ne hour north of Toronto she came to a stop, removed the map from the side-pocket in her door and with trembling hands spread it out in front of her. “This is bad news. We’re going to be doing some detours Snowy,” she mumbled. She had begun weaving in and out of cars and trucks, the gaps becoming tight in places.
    Heading on towards the next exit, s he was in the midst of a graveyard, bodies everywhere, even on the pavement. In their hysteria, people had staggered from their vehicles delirious with pain and fear. If her car broke down now, in the core of it, she was going to go to pieces.
    Her exit was less than a kilometer away. Even with each of the three lanes filling up, there had been space in-between the vehicles to weave through. Now she squeezed by a dozen vehicles and then swung around several massive trucks only to come to a complete stop.
    The pile-up before her stretched the entire three lanes and onto the shoulders. A bus filled with passengers had overturned, and several dozen cars had crashed into each other trying to avoid it. There were limbs hanging out of windows, and bloodied bodies stretched out on the road. She opened her car door and threw up.
    Wiping her face , she gazed ahead of her trying to calm herself. There was no possible chance of getting through that. The only option was to go back to the last exit. But there was no room to turn around, the two trucks she’d squeezed between blocking her view, or she never would have tried. “I don’t like this,” she whimpered, putting the car in reverse.
    She backed up until she came to the rear of the second truck. Flanking her now were several cars and she needed to swing her rear to get around them. She turned the wheel , creeping backwards inch by inch until she was in the clear. Reversing several more yards, she then swung around and began driving against traffic.
    “ How could I have been so stupid?” she panted as she made her way north again. The nightmare was returning — her positive thoughts in which she hoped to find survivors were sunk; this was the reality of life on earth. It would be this way near every major city.
    Somehow in the back of her mind she had thought there was a logical explanation for not having been rescued. She had no idea what it would have been, but that hope had been the reason she’d had the courage to make her way south in the first place. She had been in complete and utter denial over what was facing her.
    Even after what she’d seen in her own town, she had never envisioned a disaster close to the likes of this. Stupid of her, she realized now. But not thinking about such things had kept her calm and motivated. Now she had reached the last exit and it felt surreal going in the opposite direction around the access ramp.
    Of course none of the vehicles were moving, nor would they likely be doing so again, but visions of cars approaching head-on had been popping into her head all the way there; the fact that it was next to impossible didn’t seem to matter. The ramp was congested too; an unbelievable number of people had been wedged in there, trying to reach the highway with the hope of fleeing a plague that was already deep inside them.
    She crept along the shoulder until about the half-way point, where a man lay on his face, and a woman stared up at the sky, one arm over his back and the other straight out on the pavement. They stole the entire width of the shoulder.
    “ Where are my gloves?” She found them, and stepped outside, where the substantial wind was colder and damper than she’d thought, chilling her to the bone as it blew through her coat. Those storm clouds were still on the horizon heading west too, but maybe they would pass over before she reached them. She walked over to the corpses, her gaze darting around nervously in every direction — like a bird ready to take flight at the slightest sound or movement.
    T he man was huge, but she grabbed him above the